Tacitus, Histories

In the popular mind, the
history of Imperial Rome consists of the scandalous biographies of Emperors at
the center and the battles of military textbooks at the periphery, linked by
marching and countermarching iron-shod legions building bridges and roads, and
constantly revolting and hoisting one of their number aloft on their shields and
onto the Imperial throne  rather without meaning as we understand history. The
life and works of Tacitus are themselves a revelation of meaningful history in
the first generations of the Empire. He was born in the onset of the collapse of
the first principate, grew to maturity in the dark days of the reign of
Domitian, wrote his greatest works under the benign Trajan, and probably lived
on into the reign of Hadrian, the first Roman Emperor to achieve the omnipotence
of the Hellenistic King of Kings, Basileos Soter, which the
passionately philhellene Nero had so barbarously failed to even understand.

In Tacitus, Senatorial
history reaches its anticlimax, for he is the propagandist of the caste that in
Chinese affairs we call the scholar-gentry, which would never again, if the plot
of the historical drama is the shifts and conquests and losses of real power,
play a major role on the stage of Western history. After the Punic Wars, Roman
Senators were hardly gentry. They certainly never were scholars. On the face of
it, each book of Tacitus  The Germania, The Agricola, The History, and
The Annals  is a party pamphlet; yet we believe them because of their
unparalleled trenchancy. Succeeding ages assumed that his Histories
suffered only from the commendable virtue of Republican party enthusiasm and
took it for granted that the perverts and gangsters of Suetoniuss Lives of
the Twelve Caesars were figures of embittered, comic romance. Tacitus
persuades us that Tiberius and Claudius must have been the sort he says they
were.

Modern historians and the
experience of a century more embittering than the first of the Christian era
prove us wrong on both counts. Today we know that clowns and blood-drinking
perverts climb to the summits of power, pushed on by the enthusiastic applause
of the majority; nor is it now unbelievable that a Roman Emperor enjoyed being
sodomized on the public stage. But the destructive policies of morose Tiberius,
the sloth and foolery of Claudius, the lunacy of Nero are not substantiated by
research.

In Tacituss day the
economic, social, and political system against which his work is a polemic came
to its full power. Devoted to the imaginary frosty virtues of the Republic of
Livy, he lived to see the midsummer of Empire. He first appears as the
prosecutor in the Senate of the crooked Proconsul Marius Priscus for conduct
unbecoming a gentleman. In youth he visited Germany and married the daughter
of Agricola, the Governor of Britain. In the first work attributed to him, he
bemoans the decline of oratory and says flatly that the art of persuasion has
passed from the halls of justice to the study of the historian. His life of his
father-in-law is a celebration of an ideal Roman gentleman of the oldest school,
a Cincinnatus reborn; his description of the heir-apparent Germanicus, the
romance of a new aristocrat, stainless, decorative, and as politically
ineffectual as Sir Philip Sydney.

Roman history as Tacitus
knew it in his own time began with the last days of the struggle to reorganize
the Republic, while preserving its ceremonial forms, into an imperial-palace
system of the Mesopotamian-Egyptian-Chinese-Byzantine type. It was necessary to
deprive the senators and all other Republican castes of every vestige of real
power. Before Tacitus was born they had already lost all power; but he was to
establish for posterity their oligarchic mysticism as it expressed itself in
impotent resistance two generations after actual total defeat. The social role,
the moral qualities, the political competence the Senate imagined it still might
reclaim, Tacitus sculptures out of granite into an image for all time.

The real Roman oligarchy
 the gentleman-farmers, scholar-statesmen, amateur but indomitable warriors of
legend  in Tacituss day were precisely the new technocrats, proprietors of
immense slave-operated estates, court poets, holders of imperial franchises.
They were creatures of the court, eunuchs and freedmen, mostly highly cultivated
Greeks and Levantines who had never heard of the right and wrong defined in the
pages of aristocratic history and were beyond the good and evil of the heroes of
oligarchic myth.

It is because Tacitus
knew this bitter truth in his heart, although every word he wrote was devoted to
countervailing it, that his is perhaps the most mordant style in the history of
prose. It was as though he sensed that long legend of martyrdom working out in
pitiful reality which lay ahead of him  Boethius defying Theodoric, Arnold of
Brescia, Rienzi, Daniele Manin, Matteotti. So his prose gnaws and chews with a
grimness unknown to Burke, Gibbon, and their French congeners, for these men
believed that a European scholar-gentry, which in reality was to play so
fleeting a role, would succeed and all the world would be united under the
benevolent sway of enlightened Whigs and Girondins, brave and learned landlords.

In Thucydides, Plutarch,
Livy, and, above all, Tacitus, we willfully suspend disbelief and enjoy the
ceremonial stateliness of the drama and, in Tacituss case, the grandeur of his
malice, a style like a tray of dental instruments. So deeply is this style
embedded in the narrative, in every inflection of perception and judgment, that
even the most inept and donnish translators have never been able to erase it. We
read it for its relentless bite. Tacituss images of two great Roman emperors
are mirrors of contemporary figures who have created out of aristocratic
republics the all-encompassing structures of the oriental palace systems, the
imperial bureaucracies, of our own day. Tacitus too speaks against The Palace
and for his Founding Fathers, although he certainly never met a contemporary
Roman who bore the slightest resemblance to one, just like our own
Jeffersonians.

In spite of disaster,
Thucydides had the confidence of a man who could see no threat to his own kind
on any horizon. Alexander and the constellations of perfumed and jeweled
Ptolemys and Antigonids were rising slowly from the nadir of time and some day
would dominate the Greek empyrean, but of this Thucydides never dreamed. His
heroes, for all their folly and pride and covetousness, are like the
self-determining personalities caught in the dooms of Sophoclean tragedy. The
figures of Tacitus act out a melodrama in which powerless men are whirled
through catastrophe by impersonal force. The mask that garbs such force, the
Emperor as the embodiment of a dark, inscrutable Imperial will, can never be
more than a figure of gruesome farce, like the Fu Manchus, Mad Scientists, and
Master Bolsheviks of our own fictions; his opponents can never rise above the
condition of marionettes of pathos. Neither can be fully fleshed as complete
men, as heroes of a tragic history like Thucydidess, because they can never
generate their own motives. The sharpness of Tacituss bite makes it easy to
forget that melodrama prevents him from being a writer of the first rank, from
having a genuine political morality or philosophy. Many a disgusting old fraud
in Roman literature managed to convince himself he was a Stoic. Even this was
not permitted Tacitus. His personal life attitude must have been like that of
one of the gloomier Existentialists of the present day  a clerkly individual
who has discovered that his kind is no longer useful and who therefore has lost
hope in the future, faith in natural process, and charity toward his fellows.
Tacitus, writing in the Empires most halcyon season, could survey its human
relationships and come only to the judgment: no exit.

This essay is from Kenneth Rexroths Classics Revisited (copyright 1968
Kenneth Rexroth). Reproduced by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

This book is in print and available from New Directions. Do yourself a favor and get
it.